"Missed Opportunities"
Debra Burlingame - the sister of Charles F. Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which struck the Pentagon on 9-11-01 - has a must-read piece for OpinionJournal.com today.
Although there is much worthy of noting in this piece, I will point to just one key paragraph:
NBC News aired an "exclusive" story in 2004 that dramatically recounted how al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, the San Diego terrorists who would later hijack American Airlines flight 77 and fly it into the Pentagon, received more than a dozen calls from an al Qaeda "switchboard" inside Yemen where al-Mihdhar's brother-in-law lived. The house received calls from Osama Bin Laden and relayed them to operatives around the world. Senior correspondent Lisa Myers told the shocking story of how, "The NSA had the actual phone number in the United States that the switchboard was calling, but didn't deploy that equipment, fearing it would be accused of domestic spying." Back then, the NBC script didn't describe it as "spying on Americans." Instead, it was called one of the "missed opportunities that could have saved 3,000 lives."
Anytime a politician or commentator denounces the NSA's so-called "eavesdropping program," he/she should be asked: Should the NSA have monitored phone calls going into Khalid al-Mihdar's house in San Diego or not?
Although there is much worthy of noting in this piece, I will point to just one key paragraph:
NBC News aired an "exclusive" story in 2004 that dramatically recounted how al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, the San Diego terrorists who would later hijack American Airlines flight 77 and fly it into the Pentagon, received more than a dozen calls from an al Qaeda "switchboard" inside Yemen where al-Mihdhar's brother-in-law lived. The house received calls from Osama Bin Laden and relayed them to operatives around the world. Senior correspondent Lisa Myers told the shocking story of how, "The NSA had the actual phone number in the United States that the switchboard was calling, but didn't deploy that equipment, fearing it would be accused of domestic spying." Back then, the NBC script didn't describe it as "spying on Americans." Instead, it was called one of the "missed opportunities that could have saved 3,000 lives."
Anytime a politician or commentator denounces the NSA's so-called "eavesdropping program," he/she should be asked: Should the NSA have monitored phone calls going into Khalid al-Mihdar's house in San Diego or not?
posted by Thomas Joscelyn at 4:18 PM
<< Home